Custer chronicle. [volume] (Custer City, Black Hills, D.T. [S.D.]) 1880-1890, 1887-06-04

H
position on the staff Of the Lead City
Tribune, from which we take the follow
ing:
IF you, sweet miss or dear madam,
could make a layer cake the size of a
crazy-quilt, composed OF some fifty
differing layers, and while it was yet
warm and soft could thrust your fist
through it from beneath, breaking and
turning up on edge all the layers so that
one could see on its top everything that
was in 1t, you would have a small model
Of the Black Hills Of Dakota. The up
thrust fist would represent Harney's
Peak of granite all the open breaks
down the center should be filed with
granite, also. Your layers represent
successive geological ages, the oldest at
the bottom and, as upturned, nearest to
the center; for jellies and spices it must
contain gold, silver, tin, iron, copper,
nickel, mica, lead, plumbago, anthony,
and all the other minerals of which you
ever heard or never heard; around the
edges should exude petroleum, salt
springs, mineral waters Of different de-
grees Of temperature and nearly all
smells and tastes known to the pharma-
copeia there should be a fancy border
made of gypsum, clays, sandstone, and
marble in a hundred gorgeous colorings
and variegations; clothe your shattered
geological cake with a dense verdure of
pines, so dark as to make them look
black ut a distance; let pulverized rock
and mold partly fill up the wider chasms
and convert them into beautiful noun
tain parks and grassy, fiower-spangled
lawns; let thousands of springs break,
laughing, out of the crevices and caverns
and tumble and roar their way out to
the prairies in every d~irection-and
there you have the Black Hills.
Look at a map of the United States
and you will see that the south west
corner of Dakota and a piece of Wyo-
ming are almost converted into an
island by the Big Cheyenne River,
which forks at the eastern extremity of
Lawrence county, Dakota, its branches
nearly meeting again on the west of the
Hills, after completely encircling them.
From the Big Cheyenne up to the center
of this island is a rise of four thousand
feet; there is n great mesa" or
plateau, that is seven thousand feet
above the sea. while Harney's Peak
towers to a height of eight thousand two
hundred feet.
ut is IN island in another sense.
Away for hundreds Of miles in every
direction-to the Great Lake, to the
Rocky Mountains, to the north, to the
south-rolls a sea Of green prairie, in
the midst of which, "wrapt in the soil
tude of its W originality" rise the
somber, beautiful, wonderful Black
Hills.
Here is the grandest geological ca
binet on earth. There is not anywhere
80 complete a textbook. The volume
of creations chronology is here set open
in successive pages, the most recent
chapter outside, the Oldest at the center.
Before the battle Of the Pyramids,
Napoleon cried, Soldiers, from the tops
of these pyramids twenty centuries look
down upon usW A mere span of time,
boastful conqueror Standing on the
edge of the Black Hills, we can say,
Fellow creatures, from these foothills
a thousand centuries look up at u.s.
Advancing inward a space to another
chapter, it would be, "Here five thous-
and centuries look up at u.s." Half a
mile farther, cross q canon and say,
twenty thousand centuries" Then
fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, a
million centuries-until thus marching
over buried eons, we shall stand at the
granite center of this apocalypse-stone
and say reverently, as we look up old
Harney's deep-graven page. lit tires
us to tell the centuries =
"The area clasped within the arms of
the Cheyenne River constitutes the
Black Hills Region. The uplift that
marks the Black Hills g~eologically is
much smaller, it being an irregular
elipse about eighty by one hundred
miles in diameters, its longer axis lying
in a direction about ten degrees west of
northward. This elipse is walled in
by a remarkable ridge of sandstone
from two hundred to one thousand feet
high, that III sharply defines the Black
Hills uplift as if it were a rampant con-
structed by military engineers to fortify
this deposit of precious metals against
thieves that break through and steal"
Standing on this rampant and looking
outward, the green pillows stretch away
to the horizon. Facing about. you look
down, perhaps five hundred feet, per
p~endicuIarly, on a ~treeless, smooth val
ley, across which the citadel begins in
walls of limestone, back Of which are
the black-wooded hills. rising in towers.
pinnacles. deep moats, and perpen-
dicular walls to the granite center-old
Harney's frowning donion-keep."